Sarah Washburn's blog

A recent TechSoup webinar on childhood hunger and tools to find free meals surfaced a lot of interest and ideas on how organizations can help fight hunger. (Watch the archive and download resources shared during the webinar.) If you're interested in tools to help youth in your community find free meals this summer, read on.

Libraries often play a big part in the moments and months after a natural disaster. Mostly, libraries offer refuge, comfort, and contact; they're a warm place with big hearts filled with folks who know how to find help. But after those first few days of extreme need, what else can libraries offer?

There's a lot of talk about the value in leaving the library building. Not for patrons, mind you, but for staff. I'm often reminded of a marvelous tip I learned from Gail Santy, a presenter at the Association for Rural and Small Libraries conference last year (handouts from her presentation).

My friend and colleague Susan McVey, State Librarian of Oklahoma, encouraged me to share a post from Anne Masters, Director of the Pioneer Library System, which is near areas affected by the recent and tragic tornado. Find out how you can help.

We've interviewed a lot of people from libraries for the Edge Initiative. In our interviews we're trying to uncover what factors or best practices aligned to create a situation for success in a particular benchmark area. In our seven published Edge Spotlights, we uncovered that it all comes down to...

Today I read Lee Rainie’s tweet (Director of Pew Internet Project) requesting examples of innovative library services and decided to send him a few highlights from this past year. To me, some of the more innovative library programs do not fall under bleeding edge tech or super cool gadgetry categories, but under smart uses of resources to meet community needs. This past year, many of the innovative programs I heard about were focused on extending the boundaries of the library through partnerships and through reimagining services the library offers.

Have you heard about the Edge Initiative? Whether you're a seasoned expert or a recent newbie to the Edge scene, please attend the Edge Update session at MidWinter in Seattle to learn about the new and improved benchmarks, strengthened by feedback from you and your library colleagues.

It's not often an opportunity arises to provide the world's largest foundation your thoughts on your work, your field, and the resources your library needs to succeed. The Gates Foundation is asking for your perspective in an anonymous survey that will help them support today's libraries into the future.

Today as I walked in to work I was barraged by the enormous Salesforce conference (50,000 attendees!) in downtown San Francisco. This is the type of conference that defies all of my previous event experiences: a closed-off street covered with sod to create a "park" where participants can mingle and watch a presenters in front of a big screen; conference personel greeting me as I walk down the sidewalk (that was kinda nice); trucks with huge billboards advertising booth numbers and products that circle endlessly around the conference city blocks; groups of men and women in suits staring at smartphones and giving bro-hugs...